Yugoslav Talks Collapse Before They Get Started

The first effort to bring Yugoslavia’s warring factions together for peace talks collapsed before it got started Tuesday when Serbian delegates refused to attend.

The failed attempt to negotiate a way to avert further bloodshed in the Yugoslav crisis coincided with raging gun battles in ethnically mixed regions of Croatia, where at least 100 have been killed in ethnic violence already this year.

All eight members of the Yugoslav presidency, leaders of the six republics and the federal government chiefs had been called to the Adriatic island of Brioni to work out details of a shaky peace plan brokered by the European Community more than a week ago.

The negotiations were to have been the first diplomatic attempt at ironing out the issues threatening the 73-year-old federation with civil war. But the Serbian and Montenegran leaders refused to travel to Brioni, which is in Croatia, scuttling the session that many believe was the last chance for working out a compromise that could avert full-scale war.

Brioni was proposed by the Croatian head of the presidency, Stipe Mesic, after Croatian and Slovenian leaders complained that they felt unsafe traveling to Belgrade.

The Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said efforts continued to reschedule or relocate the session.

Serbian nationalists shot to death two Croatian police officers early Tuesday, one in the village of Vidusevac about 150 miles west of Belgrade and the other in the nearby village of Lipik. At least nine others were injured when Serbian militants fired mortars at several police stations around the city of Glina, about 30 miles south of the Croatian capital of Zagreb.